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‘Saint Patrick was a gentleman, sure his name we celebrate
And on the seventeenth of March the Irish congregate
A brand new hat on each man’s head and a green necktie that’s newly made
The left foot first then lightly tread on the Patrick’s Day parade.’
– Ed Harrigan and David Braham, ‘The day we celebrate’, New York, 1874
WHILE PATRICK, THE, patron saint of Ireland, reputedly lived 1700 years ago, enthusiasm for his holiday is as strong as ever. A saint’s day in the official calendar since at least 1607, it was originally a day of pilgrimage and revelry. Now celebrated with parades, performances and political appearances on every continent, St Patrick’s Day brings people together whether they claim Irish heritage or not. But how has the day changed over the past four centuries?
Thomas Dineley, visiting from England in the 1680s, gives us the earliest description of wearing green and donning shamrocks on 17 March: ‘The Irish of all stations and conditions wear crosses in their hats, some of pins, some of green ribbon, and the vulgar superstitiously wear shamrogues, 3-leaved grass, which they likewise eat (they say) to cause a sweet breath.’
The day became increasingly politicised from the late eighteenth century. The Catholic priest and pamphleteer Arthur O’Leary preached to an assembly of Cork Volunteers on St Patrick’s Day 1783, while the radical James Napper Tandy taunted the British authorities in 1798 by appearing at a well-publicised St Patrick’s Day gala dinner in Paris.
The holiday provided a public platform for radical oratory, such as veteran United Irishman William James MacNeven’s address to a meeting of New York Irish on St Patrick’s Day 1837, where toasts were drunk to Daniel O’Connell and the patriots of 1798. The liberal schoolmaster and United Irishman James Knowles was dismissed by his employer in 1816 for attending a St Patrick’s Day dinner in Belfast at which anti-government speeches were made.
Nineteenth-century Irish republican and nationalist organisations selected 17 March as a symbolic date for political acts. On St Patrick’s Day 1858 James Stephens and his associates took an oath to make Ireland ‘an independent democratic republic’ – the secret society they formed that day became known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Thomas O’Neill Russell and George Sigerson established The Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, the precursor to Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League, in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day 1877.
Beyond Ireland’s shores, the diaspora carried St Patrick’s Day celebrations around the globe. As early as 1713 Jonathan Swift found London on 17 March ‘so full of crosses, that I thought all the world was Irish.’ In 1881 the legendary Nellie Cashman organised the first celebrations of the holiday in Tombstone, Arizona, with a grand ball for the city’s 600 Irish residents. Almost a century later, the poet and activist Pat Tierney was involved in organising the first St Patrick’s Day parade in Phoenix, Arizona, while living undocumented in the US.
The first of the now-legendary New York parades was held in 1766; 250 years later, in 2016, a three-decade-long campaign (St Pat’s For All) succeeded in removing the parade organisers’ long-standing exclusion of LGBTQI+ organisations.
The Dublin St Patrick’s Day parade brings visitors from the world over, but in the early twentieth century, it was the day’s boxing events that drew crowds to the capital. In 1908, Ireland hosted its first and only world heavyweight championship match when Canadian Tommy Burns knocked out Jem Roche after just eighty-eight seconds; it remained the fastest knockout in heavyweight title history until 1982. And the twenty-round world title fight between Mike McTigue and Senegal-born Amadou M’barick Fall (‘Battling Siki’) went ahead in Dublin’s La Scala Theatre on St Patrick’s Day 1923 despite the civil war; Siki’s convoy was ambushed en route to the venue and there was a gun battle in the street afterwards.
By the early twentieth century, 17 March began to shed its image as a day for the working classes to drink and carouse, an image memorably captured in oils by Noel Erskine in 1856. As the day became more acceptable to the middle class and took on an increasingly cultured, even sanitised, tone, celebrations were marked with performances by some of the biggest names in Irish popular music in major international venues.
London’s Royal Albert Hall hosted St Patrick’s Day concerts from the late nineteenth century; by the mid-twentieth century, the billings featured household names like Donegal ballad singer Bridie Gallagher (1959) and The Chieftains (1975). The Clancys and Tommy Makem performed for President Kennedy in the White House on St Patrick’s Day 1963, the same year they first performed in Ireland, which proved a turning point in their careers.
On 17 March 1966 Larry Cunningham and The Mighty Avons played to an audience of 6,000 in the Galtymore in Cricklewood, London – the largest crowd ever seen at the venue – and became the first Irish showband to play Carnegie Hall, New York, when they joined the billing for a St Patrick’s Day concert the following year.
St Patrick’s Day has been an official holiday in Ireland since William Redmond proposed a bill of parliament in 1903, but it has been celebrated as a day of revelry, claimed as a day of political action, and embraced by communities who welcomed Irish immigrants worldwide for generations.
Whether you prefer prayer, a pint or the local parade, Beannachtaí Lá Fhéile Phádraig daoibh go léir.
Dr Angela Byrne works at the Dictionary of Irish Biography, researching Irish lives and copy editing. She has published widely on the history of travel and exploration, women’s history, and the Irish diaspora. Her latest book is Anarchy and Authority: Irish Encounters with Romanov Russia (Lilliput Press, 2024).
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